Top 300 Roger Ebert Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “The Academy is paranoid about its image.”

— Roger Ebert

252. “It often strikes me that the actors in high school movies look too old.”

— Roger Ebert

253. “From a dramatic viewpoint, there are few professions that grant their members entry into other lives, high among them cops, doctors, clergymen, journalists and prostitutes. Perhaps that explains why they figure in so much television and cinema. Their lives are lived in the midst of human drama.”

— Roger Ebert

254. “We are poor mortals, but it dreams to us that we can fly.”

— Roger Ebert

255. “Film has become a marketed commodity, and the opportunities and audiences for art cinema have grown smaller. There is a general downturn in cultural literacy, perhaps because of television.”

— Roger Ebert

256. “I have always had my doubts about any form of divine intervention in sports contests. The power of prayer may be remarkable in many other arenas, but why should God want my team to win instead of the other side? Isn’t it insulting to request God to even take an interest in baseball?”

— Roger Ebert

257. “I begin to feel like I was in the last generation of Americans who took a civics class.”

— Roger Ebert

258. “I remember when a Coke came in a six-ounce bottle, and delicious it was. Now it comes in sizes so big that I question how the human bladder can deal with the intake.”

— Roger Ebert

259. “CROUCHING TIGER is nevertheless a gloriously big epic, starring the Hong Kong action stars Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh in a visionary adventure where the characters seem set free from the force of gravity.”

— Roger Ebert

260. “Here’s a notion: Peace in the Middle East would come about more easily if the region were governed by women.”

— Roger Ebert

261. “Only enormously talented people could have made Death to Smoochy. Those with lesser gifts would have lacked the nerve to make a film so bad, so miscalculated, so lacking any connection with any possible audience.”

— Roger Ebert

262. “To die is one thing. How much worse to know that all the life that ever existed on this planet, and all it ever achieved, was to be obliterated?”

— Roger Ebert

263. “Many thrillers follow such reliable formulas that you can look at what’s happening and guess how much longer a film has to run.”

— Roger Ebert

264. “If you plan to miss this movie, better miss it quickly; I doubt if it’ll be around to miss for long.”

— Roger Ebert

265. “Anyone who reads advice books about romance has one problem to begin with: bad taste in literature.”

— Roger Ebert

266. “Growing up, I missed the whole ‘Three Stooges’ thing. Either they weren’t on the station in my hometown, or we hadn’t bought a TV set yet, or they came to town too late for me. I’m pretty sure that at the right age, I would have loved them.”

— Roger Ebert

267. “I am, beneath everything else, a fan. I was fixed in this mode as a young boy and am awed by people who take the risks of performance.”

— Roger Ebert

268. “The screenplay is so well-written in a scruffy, fanzine way that you want to rub noses in it – the noses of those zombie writers who take ‘screenwriting’ classes that teach them the formulas for ‘hit films.’”

— Roger Ebert

269. “I don’t require movies to be about good people, and I don’t reject screen violence.”

— Roger Ebert

270. “All I require of a religion is that it be tolerant of those who do not agree with it.”

— Roger Ebert

271. “I’ve never found kicks to the groin particularly funny, although recent work in the genre of the buddy movie suggests audience research must prove me wrong.”

— Roger Ebert

272. “Fate is not merely knocking on the door, it has entered with a SWAT team and is banging their heads together and administering poppers.”

— Roger Ebert

273. “Clint, my hero, is coming across as sad and pathetic. He didn’t need to do this to himself. It’s unworthy of him.”

— Roger Ebert

274. “There are few lonelier sights than a good comedian being funny in a movie that doesn’t know what funny is.”

— Roger Ebert

275. “We don’t have a lot of class-conscious filmmaking.”

— Roger Ebert

276. “But considering that I walked in expecting no complexity at all, let alone the visual wonderments, ‘Snow White and the Huntsman’ is a considerable experience.”

— Roger Ebert

277. “In the best of all possible worlds, directors would obsess about the quality of their storytelling, and not the details of their technical methods.”

— Roger Ebert

278. “It’s not often a thriller keeps me wound up as well as ‘Headhunters’ did. I knew I was being manipulated and didn’t care. It was a pleasure to see how well it was being done.”

— Roger Ebert

279. “We exist to have our wealth moved up the economic chain out of our reach.”

— Roger Ebert

280. “I am proudly a liberal. I am also patriotic, reasonable, pro-American, and stand for family values.”

— Roger Ebert

281. “I think we have to get beyond the idea that we have to categorize people.”

— Roger Ebert

282. “There’s something depressing about a young couple helplessly in love. Their state is so perfect, it must be doomed. They project such qualities on their lover that only disappointment can follow.”

— Roger Ebert

283. “Another of Keaton’s strategies was to avoid anticipation. Instead of showing you what was about to happen, he showed you what was happening; the surprise and the response are both unexpected, and funnier. He also gets laughs by the application of perfect logic.”

— Roger Ebert

284. “Time is what the depressed and panicked lack.”

— Roger Ebert

285. “Many really good films allow us to empathize with other lives.”

— Roger Ebert

286. “And the sexes eyeing each other uneasily, for nothing is easier for a teenager to imagine than rejection.”

— Roger Ebert

287. “You know a movie is slow when you start looking to see what time it is. You know it’s awful when you start shaking your watch to see if it has stopped. One.”

— Roger Ebert

288. “Class is often invisible in America in the movies, and usually not the subject of the film.”

— Roger Ebert

289. “A film is a terrible thing to waste.”

— Roger Ebert

290. “It has been said that the reason we establish relationships is to assure ourselves of a witness to our lives.”

— Roger Ebert

291. “A few actresses have all but set up shop as women of a certain age who attract younger lovers. I think of Susan Sarandon, Cameron Diaz and Isabelle Huppert.”

— Roger Ebert

292. “You can’t just tell actors, especially young ones, to ‘act happy’ and expect them to do it. They must in some essential way be happy.”

— Roger Ebert

293. “Sometimes you only need to have a few words with a person to know you would like to have many more.”

— Roger Ebert

294. “If you find an occupation you love and spend your entire life working at it, is that enough?”

— Roger Ebert

295. “People never think of themselves as choosing to be politically correct. They simply think in the way that they do.”

— Roger Ebert

296. “Because I don’t give the studios advanced quotes or an advanced look at my reviews. I think the readers deserve to read my reviews before the studios do.”

— Roger Ebert

297. “We piled into the back of his big red Sun-Times truck: Robertson, McHugh, a bagpipe player, assorted other regulars, and Good Sydney Harris. Good Sydney Harris was a Spanish Civil War veteran, not to be confused with the Bad Sydney Harris, the Daily News columnist. Good Sydney had fallen into conversation with a dominatrix named Jake, who joined us.”

— Roger Ebert

298. “The ability of an audience to enter into the narrative arc of a movie is being lost; do today’s audiences have the patience to wait for Harry Lime in The Third Man?”

— Roger Ebert

299. “There must be something deep within our memory as a species that is pleased by being able to look at what is making us warm.”

— Roger Ebert

300. “I’ve been told that I am evil. I’ve been told that I am behind the persecution of millions of Americans. That I have encouraged hate toward gays. I’ve received both very brief and obscene messages, and very long and literate messages that tell me a vote for Crash was vote for homophobia.”

— Roger Ebert